Question: how do you use the computers to investigate how the oceans and marine life change because of global warming?

Oliver Andrews answered on 5 Mar 2019: last edited 5 Mar 2019 3:14 pm

We build computer models. Computer models are simplified versions of the real world (a bit like the blocky world of Minecraft) which we program with all the knowledge we have of how the world works. For example, we know quite well how the winds and the oceans move around the globe based on maths, so we can write computer programs which “simulate” this in our models.
Models allow us to find out what happens under different future conditions. For example, we can ask our model to tell us what the planet might look like if we continue to burn fossil fuels and produce greenhouse gases (often we look in models at what might happen by 2100).
One part of these models is the ecosystem — and using this component we can try to better understand how the marine life in the oceans will change because of global warming. These ecosystem processes in our models are often based on laboratory experiments (like in science class), where we grow different types of organism and see how they respond to different temperatures or other environmental conditions.